The great prophet Stevie Wonder said “When you believe in things that you don’t understand you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.”

Stevie Wonder (Photo CC: Wikipedia Commons)

Oddly however, (with a guilty nod towards Stevie), I find my self questioning the alignment of the cosmos over the past few days: Several mainstream news items dared to state that the most public findings of the science of global warming are not a matter of debate anymore (among those who study it).

Well I’ll be darned.

Some refreshingly crisp stories and informed analyses managed to get some attention, based on their Google-search numbers last week…

Here is the New York Times offering a deeper look into CO2 levels and the end of the last ice age. Worthy of a full read.

Here is a good discussion of the real story behind the often cited solar-variability “theory” for recent warming (i.e., blaming it on sunspots, solar activity, etc.) from our friends at the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang last week. (Bottom line: Sunspots and quasi-decadal solar output changes add little to the surface temperature change signature.)

And here’s a pleasantly frank discussion from the State of Kansas, that great bastion of (failed) evolution deniers who this time seem to be at wits end over all sorts of brazen bills and mandates. In one case it seems they are trying to balance accepting grants for wind energy with the desire to ensure “debate” on global warming is amped up in schools.

Except, points out one University of Kansas teacher, Johannes J. Feddma, there is no debate:

“We’ve known for over a century about the greenhouse effect and how humans might change it. This is nothing new from a science perspective.”

One bill in the Kansas House would outlaw any activity that uses public money on “sustainability.”